These page are created in Dreamweaver and EditPlus. They use HTML 4.01 Transitional DTD and CSS. Older pages use a hodge podge of HTML versions and CSS.
My current camera is the recent Sony DSC-R1. It doesn't have the noise problems of the 828 and better F-range of the R1 means that I can take landscape photos with a greater depth of field.
On the other hand, the macro range is only 35 cm. As I like to take close-ups of flowers, I've bought some close-up lenses. Mastering them is going to take some practice. It's hard to focus with them and for the largest lenses I have to take into account that I need to crop out the vignetting from the final photo.
The fourth camera I used was a Sony DSC-F828. In all respects, except for image noise, it worked better than the 505V. The noise was a problem at all ISO settings except the very lowest so I ended up buying a Velbon tripod. After about a year I got sand in the lens so the camera was retired.
My third camera was a Sony DSC-F505V. It has a beautiful Carl Zeiss lens and gives 2.6 Megapixels. It's the kind of camera that makes people ask "Do you want some camera with your lens?" I'm deeply in love with it. It allows me much more creative freedom than the old Fuji without being nearly as heavy as the 707. The only drawback I've noticed so far is that the small camera body means that it's easy to tilt the camera without noticing.
My second camera was a Sony DSC-F707. It lasted only for a couple of days before it got stolen on a transatlantic flight. I managed to take some photos with it before we parted ways. While it was a very advanced camera with superb picture quality, it was also very heavy and a bit unwieldy.
My first camera was a Fuji MX-1700 Zoom. It cost about 400 UKP at Dixons in December -99. It took me a while to figure it out, so some of the early pictures aren't as sharp as I like. What I liked about this camera, was the small size, the battery life and above all the optical zoom function. As time passed I explored different features, learning new things right up until I got the next camera.
One feature of this camera is the brightness setting. I used it for subjects that are either very dark or very light. Skies, for instance. I also used it together with Photoshop to capture a subject with great contrast between the light without losing all detail in the dark part of the picture. Here is the result. I simply took the same picture twice but with brightness settings on either extreme and then copied them together into one image. It worked pretty well because the interface between the dark and the light areas was so simple. It would have been a nightmare on a picture like this.
Another feature I explored a bit was the macro function. It helped me take really crisp pictures of small plants.
The longer I used this camera, the more I became aware of its limitations. Dealing with contrast, for instance, was not easy. In this picture you can see that both in the path that leads into the picture, and in the blue of the birch twigs. Often the lightest part of the picture simply washed out. The quality is still a far cry away from good quality slide film. On those rare sunny days I would like to put a polarising filter on the camera so that the colours are still crisp and saturated. That's not possible on this camera. Take this picture for instance, the sky was really a lot bluer than this.
Images are processed using Photoshop. Some images I just crop and reduce in size. Others I put more effort into. A favourite trick of mine is to add layers of semitransparent colour and then to erase them in front of the main motif in a picture. I've successfully used it to brighten pictures taken at low light levels. It's also useful for making a noisy background less attention-grabbing.
